Beginning

 I wrote this months ago, but since this is the first post, and since I've taken so long to actually get this going I decided it was a good one to start with. What I wrote is still mostly true. The rest of my blogs will hopefully be written as I go, not pulled from an archive somewhere.

               My art teacher in High School used to give the best lectures I’ve ever heard. What made these lectures so great is that they were only veiled in the topic of art. In the years since I’ve left his classroom I’ve only found them to become more and more applicable in my life. They spring out from random places, suddenly there, aglitter in front of me pointing out something I’d never noticed before, revealing some deeper meaning about myself and about my life.

               Everything has three stages, he once told us, the beginning, the middle, and the end. Everything must be started, everything must be carried through, and everything must finish. Put the veil of art over this and it seems very simple. Any art piece, a vase, a painting, a wood block print, has had a maker that goes through the process. The start of an artwork from the conception to picking the media, to taking the blank canvas and making the first mark has a beginning. The middle is the obvious continuation, erasing, redrawing, coloring, and so on. And the finish is pushing through and putting on the last touches, adding in the flourishes, perhaps even signing the piece. But the method wasn’t the point of the lecture. He told us that each one of us would be very good at one of these things, and very bad at another. I happen to be very, very bad at starting something.

               I would often sit countless class periods daydreaming and trying to figure out a concept, trying to come up with an idea. I would wait for my muse to strike so I could finally have something to do, some passion to put on the blank page in front of me. Once the inspiration struck, though, wasn’t the end of it. It would take me even longer to figure out HOW to do it. I could get as far as laying out the basic sketch to erase it again and start the process over. Starting a piece of art was akin to climbing a mountain for me. I could think of nothing more difficult.

               My trouble with starting something didn’t end with my chalk pastels, however. I noticed that when I started a paper for a different class it would take me nearly as long to simply start the paper as it would to write the 4 pages that followed. I had friendships that would last for years on end, but it would take me nearly a year to begin a new one, to get up the courage to talk to a person. Once I got into the habit of things, like going to church, or later to my college classes, or even to watering my plants I would do fine. But if I missed just two or three days it would take an insurmountable energy to get me back on the right path.

               So here I am, six years after I hear this lecture and I’m still thinking of the countless ways it can apply. Because here I am, six years later, newly married, in a new apartment, at a new job, starting an entirely new life and I feel stuck.  Everything in my life is just beginning, starting, and I don’t know what to do. I feel the weight like Atlas and I’m struggling to keep my head above water.  I am being so overwhelmed with everything there is to start and to get moving that I feel as though I’d rather crumple up the paper and give up on the drawing altogether. I’m finding myself losing passion for everything, getting frustrated with life and people because suddenly my life is at the starting point again, only this time I don’t have birthdays and parents forcing me to keep stepping forward. I’m finding myself at a loss with what I should be doing, where I should be going. Worst of all, I find myself at a loss for what used to make me feel alive and excited to face all these things. The constant beginnings life is filled with. I feel lost. And I simply don’t know what to do here at these crossroads of endings and beginnings.